Examination of Witnesses (Questions 680-699)
MS SALLY
BROOKS, MR
MARTIN LIPSON
AND MR
TIM BYLES
6 DECEMBER 2006
Q680 Fiona Mactaggart: It sounds
to me as though we have this massive national programme and we
forgot to tell people at the beginning—let us be honest—that
it was a massive national building programme.
Ms Brooks: Yes.
Q681 Fiona Mactaggart: We treated
it as though it was a bit of capital renewal. That is one of the
reasons why it has ended up in this problem. Is it practical to
have 150 or however many different projects doing it here, doing
it there, when we know there is a lack of capacity in procurement
expertise, project management and of turning the vision into reality?
Would it not be more sensible perhaps for Partnership for Schools
or whatever to have a centralised team, with experience from previous
projects, which is going into places and providing that kind of
spine of support?
Ms Brooks: They do provide that
support. We have had lots of discussions about how we can support
local authorities: Could we get highly paid professional project
managers and send them in? But it is all about knowing the area,
knowing the schools, knowing the challenges. It is something that
has to be driven locally. Most of the problems that arise, which
I see slow things down—around pupil place planning, relationships
between the schools, schools that do not want to be closed and
maybe the local authority is proposing to close them because they
are failing—are all about that local context. It is not
at the moment particularly about managing major building projects,
because most of them have not started, but a lot of the slowdown,
a lot of the delays are around things that only those local partners
can deal with, because they are the only people who know them
and understand them in detail and have relationships set up. I
think PfS can and do support with a great deal of support, but
sending somebody in...? We all know how sensitive local authority
relationships are. A load of schools in a local authority area,
with that diverse set of stakeholders, is always complex and difficult
to manage, even before you get into closing schools, buying land,
opening new schools and so on. Really, in my experience, it is
the local authority and the local schools and governors who are
the only people who can manage that.
Mr Byles: We want to tune the
level of our support to the capacity to deliver locally. Sometimes
that is more hands on and sometimes it is more facilitative, as
it can be with the role of 4ps. If we have a judgment about capacity
and we can judge through the life of a project when that is rolling,
that is fine, but the more difficult question is what happens
when it all starts to fall over and then—which I think is
behind part of your question—how best do we intervene in
order to make sure that the thing stays on track? That is one
of the challenges. We are overcoming that at the moment by having
a recognised role for having access to local government's own
sponsored support mechanism in order to make sure the thing delivers.
Mr Lipson: I mentioned earlier
that in the early days of planning BSF local government had been
very involved, and I do not think it would have been acceptable
to local government to pursue the idea that there was an organisation
that ran the projects from the centre. That would never have been
agreed. So we have a very sensible acknowledgement of the role
of the local authority—and I would like to answer the question
that was answered earlier—as the principal client, because
I think it is. It is the local authority that signs the contracts
with the LEP, with various advisors and so forth. We have here
a multiple client programme. We have the Department and PfS and
local government and schools all working together. It has to be
that way to get the thing to work properly with the ambitions
that we all have.
Q682 Fiona Mactaggart: Is that local
economic partnerships' model working properly? Does it succeed?
Mr Lipson: I think it takes some
years to bed in something like this. Because it is a long-term
programme, we have the chance to get this right. It does not work
perfectly to start with. It cannot do. Three years in, it is starting
to work very well. There is a lot of creative discussion going
on between all the parties now about how to improve it and embed
those changes.
Mr Byles: The Local Education
Partnership needs to be seen in the context of the range of partnership
delivery mechanisms that a local authority is used to having within
that community strategy for its whole area. This is recognisable
language in local terms. We are adding to it, though, a determination
which is quite hard technically to make sure that this programme
delivers in a very commercial sense. I have a good degree of confidence
that this is recognisable territory for local communities. It
is taking it into a new area, and that needs to be proved through
time, but I am quite sure it is a very effective mechanism to
draw things together.
Q683 Fiona Mactaggart: Do you have
a central mechanism which makes sure you can count the benefits'
realisation? You say you have an educational vision. How are you
going to account for benefits' realisation from this programme
for every local authority?
Mr Byles: We are looking at the
plan of what they want to achieve in overall education terms.
We are framing that very specifically in terms of a programme
of investment in relation to individual schools. Progress against
that is monitored and measured at each stage of that procurement
process, from the issue of an official journal notification, through
to the selection of preferred bidder, to a financial close and
delivery of the schools, and will then be monitored. You have
to understand that we are in the process of all of those. A school
has not yet opened under Building Schools for the Future, but,
once it is open, how it is satisfied against key performance indicators,
including educational attainment, will be a key part of the measure.
At this moment we are concentrating on the agreed vision and strategy
for delivering a range of finite, quite specific investment outcomes,
and we are judging that process through time against expectations
in terms of cost, budget and delivery.
Ms Brooks: We do also have an
evaluation programme. We have let a contract to do a more long-term
evaluation of educational outcomes which is, of course, as always,
the most difficult thing to evaluate. It is a major government
capital programme, so we have an evaluation programme in place,
but that almost cannot start until the first schools are built.
Then we will be looking closely at whether there is a real impact
on educational attainment.
Q684 Chairman: Just before we move
on to talk more about sustainability, from the way you have been
answering the questions Fiona has been asking, does that mean
that waves 1, 2 and 3 are going to get a really bad deal? I still
have the scars of Jarvis, because we were one of the eager, first
PFI schemes. Does that mean that waves 1, 2 and 3 are going to
be the rather poor relations? In the future, will people look
back and say, "What a great pity they went first. Look at
what they have"?
Mr Lipson: I was referring earlier
on to the difficulties and delays that might have occurred for
some of the early projects. I do not think this is necessarily
reflected in the outcome. There is one authority in the North
West which is closing pretty well all its secondary schools and
building new ones, a very dramatic vision change. The fact that
they may have experienced some delays because they are an early
project does not mean that that outcome is not going to be superb.
Q685 Chairman: If they are all much
less sustainable than the buildings they replace, that would not
be too good.
Mr Lipson: I was not answering
that in terms of sustainability but in terms of the discussion
we have just had.
Q686 Mr Carswell: Sustainability
is basically a centrally driven agenda, is it not? You in Whitehall
are determining the shape of the very buildings and the classrooms.
It is not very localised, is it? You talked about the facilitation
of the process; you talked about the education planning team.
Whatever language you used, this is the centre basically deciding
the shape of classrooms locally, is it not?
Mr Byles: No.
Ms Brooks: Not at all. We very
much do not. We produce guidance, we produce minimum standards,
we produce exemplar designs and we produce a lot of forward-thinking
designs for local authorities and schools to learn from, but there
is no way that we from the centre say what size or shape the classrooms
have to be.
Q687 Mr Carswell: Were there centrally
approved designs and minimum standards before this?
Ms Brooks: No, we do not approve
designs. We create guidance notes. We create minimum standards
which prevent local authorities, schools' architects and whatever
from doing something which is dreadfully bad, but they do not
constrain local authorities or architects, who can have a lot
of freedom within them. They are minimum standards guidance.
Q688 Mr Carswell: Within that centrally
defined framework.
Ms Brooks: Yes. We have a framework
of how many square metres a pupil needs for their day: a certain
number of square metres for classroom, for circulation, for dining
and so on. We fund within overall space standards, which have
gone up about 25% in the last two years. Within that, there is
tremendous flexibility for architects to do what they want locally
and we certainly do not approve their designs.
Q689 Mr Carswell: I wondered to what
extent the origins of the sustainability policy initiative were
with ministers. I know in theory all policies are driven by ministers,
but could you talk me through the origins of the policy. Did Mr
Miliband walk in one day and say, "Hey, guys, we need sustainable
schools" or was there a corporate departmental view about
it beforehand? Were there recommendations and suggestions from
the Department maybe put to ministers about sustainability?
Ms Brooks: Originally, I do not
know, because I was not here. When I arrived, sustainability was
an element of what we were expecting out of Building Schools for
the Future. With BREEAM, which I am sure you have spoken about,
the "very good" and "excellent" guidelines
were being brought in and we were expecting all BSF schools to
meet BREAAM "very good". I have to say I do not know
whether that came originally from ministers. I am assuming it
did. I certainly know that in the last couple of years, with sustainability
becoming higher and higher profile, we are being asked by ministers
to look at higher and higher standards for these schools in terms
of sustainability. That is a combination of the fact that, in
life, sustainability has a much higher profile now than it did
three years ago. When BSF was originally set up, I do not think
most people were talking that much about sustainability as of
the highest priority, whereas now it is very high on everyone's
agenda and we are adapting BSF accordingly.
Mr Byles: It is important to see
sustainability in its broader context. In my previous life, I
chaired for five years a local government construction taskforce,
and Martin was and is an active member of that group, where the
whole issue of sustainability from a local perspective as well
as a national one had a very significant profile. I cannot agree
with the proposition that sustainability is something that solely
emanates from the minds of ministers. It has several dimensions:
environmental, social and economic. The power of sustainability
in local communities, when you talk to head teachers or local
schools about what sustainability means: yes, it does mean whole
life costing and the whole approach to the maintenance and management
of buildings but it also means the siting of those buildings so
that there is ready, safe access to them in terms of transport,
walking and cycling.
Q690 Mr Carswell: You are arguing
that it was not exclusively the initiative of ministers; that
it came from maybe the DfES.
Mr Byles: I am describing that
there is a groundswell of support across the country for sustainability
in its broad environmental, economic and social context, and this
initiative has achieved a significant resonance across local government
because of that desire in local communities and local participants
to deliver in those terms. It makes sense to local communities
to have safe places for children to get to school, to reduce the
use of the private car, to see that as part of a broader public
transport strategy, because that is good for the whole community
as well as good for the investment programme that is BSF.
Mr Lipson: You are asking the
question: Did sustainability come in with Building Schools for
the Future? The answer is no. It was already embedded in the PFI
schools programme before. If you use BREEAM as a measure, it was
a requirement in the standard contract between 2001 and 2003,
so the latter stages of the PFI programme had BREEAM "very
good" as a basic requirement for all schools in that programme.
Q691 Mr Carswell: It is deeply embedded
within the educational, professional civil servants, rather than
elected ministers.
Mr Lipson: It was already there.
BSF has taken it further.
Ms Brooks: I have received helpful
advice from behind, from people who were there when it started,
which I had forgotten. Charles Clarke, the Secretary of State
at the time when BSF was being set up, was quite passionate about
sustainability and so it was always high on the agenda of DfES
ministers. It is now more broadly rising up the agenda across
the whole of government.
Q692 Mr Carswell: I wondered, at
a personal level in my constituency, if you are aware of Bishop's
Park School in Clacton as a model of sustainability.
Ms Brooks: Yes.
Q693 Mr Carswell: You are aware of
it.
Ms Brooks: I have been there.
Q694 Mr Carswell: Is it a sustainable
school?
Mr Lipson: Yes, it is an award
winning PFI school.
Q695 Mr Carswell: Is that to say
it will not close?
Mr Lipson: I do not think so.
It is part of a very good will procured package by the county
there. I think it is a very good example of how these things can
be done really well.
Q696 Mr Carswell: It definitely will
not be shut down.
Mr Lipson: I cannot answer that.
Ms Brooks: I went to see it and
spoke to the head teacher and it has, as I am sure you now, an
interesting arrangement of three blocks that meet together. I
said to him: "Is this sustainable? This obviously reflects
the way you choose to teach but what about when you have left
and there is a new head teacher, because it is a fairly specific
way of teaching?" He talked me through the way those blocks
could either be used for year groups or subject groups or houses.
The design specifically looked at various different ways you could
use that. Somebody asked: "Who is the client? Is it the local
authority or the school?" You have to have a balance there,
because if you have a very forceful head teacher in a school who
has very passionate ideas about something, they may leave in five
years time, and if the building has been designed to fit what
they particularly wanted that could cause a problem. With this
school, very clearly it is sustainable because the form in which
it is designed can help any different number of ways of teaching.
Q697 Mr Carswell: But you would agree
that it would be richly ironic if, having ticked all the boxes
for what constitutes sustainability, it then closed or was turned
over to an alternative purpose.
Mr Lipson: It might be ironic,
but this is part of the discussion we were having earlier about
the difficulty of planning long-term future in education. We do
not know what may happen to the popularity of a whole range of
schools in the area, to changes in policy that might make the
popularity of schools vary.
Q698 Mr Carswell: Would that not
indicate that sustainability is not purely a question of architecture
and design but it is about educational ethics, about what you
teach, about school discipline, about things like that.
Mr Lipson: I would agree with
that.
Q699 Chairman: I think we would all
agree with that, would we not?
Ms Brooks: Yes.
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